News.me is a service that combs through your social network feeds for news …

Keeping up on the news items that your friends share on Twitter or Facebook can sometimes be a full-time job—especially if you have a full-time job and can't afford to stay on top of the interesting items your friends are linking to all day. Sure, you might add a couple to your Instapaper queue for later, but even just the act of digging through mountains of daily-life status updates for news from your friends can be a chore if you actually care about the links that they're sharing.

Enter News.me, an online service that combs through your social network feeds and filters out the cruft to bring you a list of the most important news stories shared by the people you follow. Its genesis in 2011 was an idea out of the New York Times R&D lab that eventually bloomed into a full-on service. And on Thursday, News.me launched its first iPhone app along with a few new service improvements in hopes of capturing the attention of the news-consuming smartphone crowd.

The goal isn't to just be yet another news service—the idea is that you're more likely to care about what your friends and family are sharing (compared to a standard firehose of news coming from every direction), which is why you might want to use a service that analyzes your feeds for shared stories. "We're bringing you the best of your Twitter and Facebook in a streamlined interface, along with a venue for you to converse about news with your friends," News.me developer Robert Haining told Ars on Thursday.

We decided to give the new iPhone app the quick hands-on treatment to see how well that idea really works on a 3.5-inch screen. The first thing to keep in mind is that, although you have to sign up in order to use News.me, your friends don't have to. Once you link up your News.me account to Twitter and/or Facebook, it automatically combs through your feeds for news stories whether or not your friends are also on News.me. Once it's done, your main feed should show you a list of stories along with who shared it and where, and whatever comments they made along with the story.

These stories were shared by my contacts on Twitter and Facebook, so News.me assumes I'd be more interested in them than a standard, unfiltered news feed.

In the screenshot on the left, you can see that two of my Twitter friends (my Ars colleagues @JBrodkin and @absonnenberg) shared our Windows 8 Consumer Preview while New York Times reporter @BrianStelter shared a link about Barack Obama. On the right is one story pulled in from Facebook (incidentally, from the Ars Technica Facebook page that I follow) that links to a story about rising temperatures on Earth.

When you tap on a story, the app brings up the text of that article along with any associated photos and gives you the opportunity to "react" to it:

I'm left wondering how much the "Sad" preset will be abused.

There's a list of predefined reactions, or you can type your own. This is actually one of the new features added to News.me with the iPhone app's release, but this is one feature that does depend on your friends being members of News.me.

From the main screen, you can tap the icon on the upper left to see three options (News, Reactions, and Reading List), and when you tap on Reactions, you can see any comments that your other friends on News.me have made on various stories. Right now, I only have one connection on News.me (the aforementioned Haining), and so my Reactions list is a little limited. But assuming you had more friends using the service, it could be a useful way to cross streams and discover stories from each other's feeds.

I only have one contact on News.me so far, so my Reactions list is quite limited

The News.me iPhone app also offers a Reading List feature, which is pretty much what you would expect. Like Safari's Reading List or even Instapaper itself, you can mark stories from your News.me feed to read offline. But don't worry: it doesn't necessarily mean you have to start using yet another app for this purpose—you can set up the app to sync your News.me reading list with Instapaper if you already use that service so that your articles are collected in one place. Still, the functionality does raise questions about how content producers might benefit; since News.me brings in articles without you ever clicking on the original source and reformats them without advertising, publications that rely on advertising to keep the lights on don't get anything out of the views.

Like Instapaper and services like it, you can save stories to read later. On the upside, you can sync them back to Instapaper. Yay!

Despite that nitpick, I do like the app overall. Its functionality is simple, but in a good way—it offers you exactly what it says it will in a fairly easy-to-use manner. There were a couple stories in my News.me feed that didn't quite make sense (it seemed to bring in shopping links that some of my friends had shared, which aren't exactly "news"), but those were pretty rare and not a huge inconvenience to skip. I don't see myself using the reaction feature as much as some others might, only because most of my friends aren't yet using News.me and therefore will never see my reactions there. But that's really secondary to the main functionality, which is to separate actual news from the people I care about on Twitter and Facebook and present them to me in a single place, and that part is solid.

It's worth noting that while the News.me iPhone app is new, the company already has an iPad app available on the App Store as well. This is unfortunately not the case for Android phone and tablet users, however, and Haining tells us that an app for Android users isn't yet in the works. For the time being, it looks like News.me is primarily targeting e-mail users (via its website) and iOS users as its main audience, but if you already own one of those devices and you want to stay more up-to-date on the news your friends are sharing, it's certainly worth checking out.

8 Reader Comments

When you first start the app it says 'it automatically shares the stories you are reading, to opt out go to settings', then it points to the settings gear. However in the settings there is no option to opt out. So does that mean every story you read using news.me gets posted to your twitter account ?

You know how you avoid getting people's breakfast choices mixed with your news? The NYTimes RSS feed! This is really going across the river to get water (dunno if that's a saying in English, but it fits). I wan't news on technology I go to Ars, NYT/tech etc. I don't hope someone I know happen to 'like' a tech story.

Where did this silly notion come from: "..you're more likely to care about what your friends and family are sharing"? No, not really. With everyone I know on FB it's still all garbage. I can count on one hand the news items I've seen on FB that have been interesting (and they have all been locked into some app I don't want to install). And I have never shared one myself. Why should I? What do I have to gain? What do other people have to gain by sharing it with me? This system makes no sense.

Isn't this just like Flipboard? I can't really see any added functionality except the relatively trivial "reaction" thingy.. Sure, seeing just news could be nice sometimes, but that requires the app to decide what is news and what isn't. Judging from the review, News.me doesn't seem to do a great job with that.

You know how you avoid getting people's breakfast choices mixed with your news? The NYTimes RSS feed! This is really going across the river to get water (dunno if that's a saying in English, but it fits). I wan't news on technology I go to Ars, NYT/tech etc. I don't hope someone I know happen to 'like' a tech story.

Then that's a mighty small universe in which you receive news. It may be that those are your canonical sources for news -- the sources you trust the most. But that doesn't mean that elsewhere around the web there aren't interesting stories posted to other insightful and interesting sites. Or interesting perspectives on the same story.

Quote:

Where did this silly notion come from: "..you're more likely to care about what your friends and family are sharing"? No, not really. With everyone I know on FB it's still all garbage. I can count on one hand the news items I've seen on FB that have been interesting (and they have all been locked into some app I don't want to install). And I have never shared one myself. Why should I? What do I have to gain? What do other people have to gain by sharing it with me? This system makes no sense.

That's a rather cynical attitude. It's about broadening people's horizons since you can't view the entire web yourself. I guess social media companies like these assume that, aside from the news sources you trust implicitly, the next likely source of trust revolves around people you consider friends or family.

You know how you avoid getting people's breakfast choices mixed with your news? The NYTimes RSS feed! This is really going across the river to get water (dunno if that's a saying in English, but it fits). I wan't news on technology I go to Ars, NYT/tech etc. I don't hope someone I know happen to 'like' a tech story.

Then that's a mighty small universe in which you receive news. It may be that those are your canonical sources for news -- the sources you trust the most. But that doesn't mean that elsewhere around the web there aren't interesting stories posted to other insightful and interesting sites. Or interesting perspectives on the same story.

Quote:

Where did this silly notion come from: "..you're more likely to care about what your friends and family are sharing"? No, not really. With everyone I know on FB it's still all garbage. I can count on one hand the news items I've seen on FB that have been interesting (and they have all been locked into some app I don't want to install). And I have never shared one myself. Why should I? What do I have to gain? What do other people have to gain by sharing it with me? This system makes no sense.

That's a rather cynical attitude. It's about broadening people's horizons since you can't view the entire web yourself. I guess social media companies like these assume that, aside from the news sources you trust implicitly, the next likely source of trust revolves around people you consider friends or family.

If it's big enough it will be on every news site anyway. So again; why bother scouring through crap on facebook for it? How many "celebrity x is dead?" stories go around twitter each month? Why should I trust my friends to be journalists, when there are dedicated, trained (arguably in some cases) journalists who will do this for me?

Cynical perhaps. But every time I think of posting something to facebook I stop and think why? Will anyone care? Will someone be offended (politics, religion etc)? What do I get out of it? And in the end I decide there's no point. I think I posted something to facebook last about a year ago..

I read all kinds of interesting stories that I only see because of people I follow on Twitter posting them. So the model definitely works on some level in my experience. Like anything your mileage may vary. My Twitter follows are pretty curated for instance.

Is it just me, or does the UI for this app look like a greyscale version of Facebook? Especially with the source list being "underneath" and to the left of the main screen. They even used the same icon for it (the three horizontal lines at the top left).

DrDenim is right, friends make bad editors. There is a third way to discover content that nobody has mentioned yet in this thread--algorithmic discovery that ignores your social graph. The best-known example is Zite, which lets you follow a wide variety of topics, then learns what you like from your feedback. It looks beyond what your Facebook friends and Twitter sources react to, to show you the best of the social web--content that the social web as a whole has promoted, not just your tiny slice of it.

This means much better relevance than you would get on News.me, and more exposure to alternative viewpoints. Unfortunately, this approach still leaves out a lot of quality content that the social web has not promoted enough, particularly niche content.

For example, I am interested in web content discovery, which means finding interesting content on the web. I can't directly follow it on News.me. All I can do is follow people who tweet a lot about it. But that's a lot of work, comes with a lot of noise, and is bound to miss some content. I have tried to follow it on Zite, but Zite doesn't have that topic. The only good way to follow that topic that I have found is Trapit, which pulls content from a wide swath of the web without regard for social signals like +1's and retweets.

Basically, the more attention you pay to a given person's social network, the harder it is to find news on niche topics for that person. Of course, using friends as editors makes it easier to talk about news with your real-life social network, which has its place. But I actually prefer to talk about news with people who share my interests, not people who I know in real life.